King of Pop Michael Jackson's mother is seeking billions of dollars from tour promoter AEG Live over her son's 2009 death, in a trial that will finally get underway in Los Angeles in April.

Jury selection begins Tuesday for the trial, in which Katherine Jackson accuses AEG of negligently hiring doctor Conrad Murray to look after her son as he prepared for a doomed series of London shows.

Indian and Afghan producers of children's TV favorite "Sesame Street" are brainstorming in a New Delhi office, swapping tips on how to make Big Bird and his fluffy pals palatable to local viewers.

As the show makes India a satellite hub for production and training, it is a chance for the Afghan producers to tap into their Indian peers' six years of experience in balancing sensitivities in their own culturally and religiously diverse nation.

Queen singer Freddie Mercury disguised the late Princess Diana as a male model and smuggled her into a notorious gay bar, according to a memoir serialized in Britain's Sunday Times.

Comedian Cleo Rocos describes in her book "The Power of Positive Drinking" how she, Mercury and fellow comedian Kenny Everett dressed Diana in an army jacket, cap and sunglasses for a night out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, south London, in the late 1980s.

A federal judge says actress Angelina Jolie didn't steal the story for her movie "In the Land of Blood and Honey" from a Croatian author.

City News Service reports Friday's tentative ruling in Los Angeles will quash the lawsuit accusing Jolie of copyright infringement.

Robert Redford will appear in the next "Captain America" blockbuster -- and the Hollywood legend and independent movie guru insists he is not selling out.

The 76-year-old Redford will play a senior leader in the secret government agency of S.H.I.E.L.D in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," scheduled for release next year, according to the LA Times.

Sante D'Orazio, a photographer at the heart of the supermodel era, said Friday the switch to digital cameras means greater detail than ever before, but the loss of something more important: beauty.

"The sense of emotion is gone. It creates a detachment from the subject. The character of the personality is gone," D'Orazio said of the digital production chain and its torrent of perfect, heavily-edited pictures.

Joining a cacophonous debate over gun violence in the United States, a new film probes behind the headlines of a 2002 shooting spree that terrorized the area around the nation's capital.

New York-based French director Alexandre Moors's film "Blue Caprice" premiered at the Sundance festival and was chosen to open the New Directors New Films festival that ends in Brooklyn this Sunday.

"African" curves or an "international" silhouette? On the airwaves and the catwalks of Ivory Coast, a war of words has broken out between admirers of voluptuous female figures and those who plump for a more streamlined, traditionally Western, shape.

The young Ivorian singer "Princesse Amour" is hoping for a hit with her song celebrating "lalas", the name she has given to slender, small-breasted women.

Moroccan rapper Mouad Belghouat, a voice of the February 20 pro-reform movement jailed for defaming the police, was freed on Friday after serving a one-year sentence.

Belghouat, 25, was arrested in March last year and convicted over a song he wrote called "Dogs of the State," which denounced police corruption and was deemed an affront to Morocco's entire police force.

Marilyn Monroe's letter of despair to mentor Lee Strasberg, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's heartfelt missives to his wife during World War II are among hundreds of historical documents being offered in an online auction. Also included is a draft letter from John Lennon to Linda and Paul McCartney around the time of the breakup of the Beatles.

Monroe's handwritten, undated letter to the famed acting teacher is expected to fetch $30,000 to $50,000 in the May 30 sale.